Mexican immigrants walk in line through the Arizona desert near Sasabe, Sonora state, in an attempt to illegally cross the Mexican-US border, 06 April 2006. While thousands of mexicans try to cross the border daily from Sasabe city, the US Senate reached a breakthrough agreement on a legislation that would grant legal residency status to millions of undocumented workers in the United States. Getty/AFP PHOTO/ Omar TORRES

The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) filed a lawsuit Monday afternoon against the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of several environmental groups and other plaintiffs for ignoring the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

“For the last 46 years, NEPA has required any agency considering an action that will affect the environment to analyze and publicize those effects,” IRLI wrote in a statement about the lawsuit. “DHS, like its predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), has never considered or analyzed the enormous impacts to the human environment caused by legal and illegal immigration, as required by NEPA.”

IRLI is representing Whitewater Draw Natural Resource Conservation District, Hereford Natural Resource Conservation District, Arizona Association of Conservation Districts, Californians for Population Stabilization, Scientists and Environmentalists for Population Stabilization, New Mexico Cattle Growers Association, Floridians for Sustainable Population, Glen Colton, and Ralph Pope in the lawsuit. The case was filed in the the United States District Court of the Southern District of California.

The complaint against the DHS states: “The primary factor driving U.S. population growth is international migration. Immigrants from abroad add directly to the nation’s population by their arrival and by the children they have after they come. Because the fertility of American women has been at or
below replacement level for many years — 2.1 children per women- absent immigration there would be very little long-term population growth in the United States.”

Former Colorado Democratic Gov. Richard D. Lamm is a plaintiff in the lawsuit. He is on the advisory board for Californians for Population Stabilization. He said in an affidavit, “That unspoiled, beautiful Colorado that stirred me so deeply has fallen victim to population growth, which is inseparable from mass foreign immigration.”

John Charles Oliver, president of Floridians for a Sustainable Population, is also a plaintiff. He said in the complaint that the population growth due to mass migration has ruined the reefs in which he enjoys diving in. “Today, the beautiful coral reefs I dived and fished [on] in Broward and Palm Beach County are no longer living[;] [93%] of hard corals have vanished due to six municipal sewage outfalls, port-dredging, and coral bleaching due to carbon acidification caused by the increase of fossil fuels being burned,” the lawsuit states.

Another plaintiff Caren Cowan, executive director of the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association, said she no longer feels safe out on the range due to fear of illegal border-crossers. The lawsuit states, “Her grandmother’s homestead was ransacked and despoiled by illegal aliens on multiple occasions.”

The DHS has undergone 32 actions that have impacted the environment, according to IRLI. This includes a variety of asylum policies, prosecutorial discretion, and President Obama’s executive amnesty.